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DNS Overages & Using The 95th Percentile Burstable Billing Model

We pride ourselves on blazing our own path. We do things a little differently around here and that even extends to the way we bill our Enterprise DynECT Managed DNS clients.

Rather than raw DNS queries, which are the norm within the industry, we look at Queries Per Second (QPS). This allows us to look at rates and bursts. A thousand queries all at once is a very different animal than one query a second all day.
To do this, we start by normalizing all raw queries over a 5-minute interval into a single QPS average data point. These are plotted throughout the month to provide your overall traffic curve.

Because of the 95th Percentile, every point above the solid black line would not appear on your bill.

However, billing on peak volume is troublesome.

What happens if you have a really great promotion on your site around the holidays or Cyber Monday doubles your traffic? Is that going to be an overage?

To solve this, we work on a 95th Percentile “burstable” billing model. This takes the top five percent of all data points and throws them out.

In a situation like above, that means your peak 36 hours disappears from the bill! Presto!

So go out, send that marketing campaign (perhaps with our DynECT Email Delivery), have a promo and take over the world. We have your infrastructure needs covered and you won’t get whacked on overages for that big day.

If you’re tired of paying overage charges for your site’s success, drop us a line if you would like to hear more about our DynECT service line!

Matt Torrisi is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Oracle Dyn Global Business Unit, a pioneer in managed DNS and a leader in cloud-based infrastructure that connects users with digital content and experiences across a global internet.